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It's worth knowing the specific reasons why the board fired Sam before assessing the value of this news. Too much rumor and not enough evidence.

• brookst 3y ago
  It seems clear that there weren’t specific reasons, just a kind of final straw in the product announcements that made the board realize how far from the original mission the company had drifted. Turning it into an emergency and surprise coup with innuendo of wrongdoing looks to have been a huge mistake, and may result in total loss of control where a more measured course correction could have succeeded.
  • manyoso 3y ago
    Whatever the case all involved look terrible.
  • itchy_spider44 3y ago
    Ilya is the stereotypical genius mind that is extremely passionate yet disconnected from the real world. He got way too worked up about abstract issues, failed to see the bigger picture and had a meltdown that other board members took seriously because he's a cofounder. He is instrumental in the research but he shouldn't be running the business.
    • shrimpx 3y ago
      > He is instrumental in the research but he shouldn't be running the business. To push back on this a bit. If two yet unknown people, "an Altman" and "an Ilya", both applied to YC to start a company that builds and sells AI models, guess who would get funded. Not the guy who can't build AI models. I find it bizarre that the guy who can build is suddenly the villain-nerd who can't be trusted, and the salesman is the hero, in this community.
      • fidotron 3y ago
        There has been a huge cultural shift in tech towards devaluing builders and (excessively) emphasising the roles of operations and sales. In reality you need all of them, and they are all separate talents, but things are clearly unbalanced.
        • shrimpx 3y ago
          It's how whole industrial sectors become enshittified.
          • rrdharan 3y ago
            The word enshittified has officially been enshittified.
            • ethbr1 3y ago
              Enshittiception
        • null0pointer 3y ago
          Right, I’ve noticed this trend too. It sucks and I find myself frustrated by how easily people go along with smooth talking sales/business types and allow them to take over positions of power. The truth is that builders can exist and build amazing products without the sales guys, but the sales guys would have absolutely nothing without the builders. I’d even go a step further and say that the best products are built by solo or small teams of impassioned builders and as soon as sales/business types get involved things start tending towards enshittification.
      • WalterSear 3y ago
        IMHE at YC, I'd put my money on whichever talked a more monetizable game.
      • Tenoke 3y ago
        They'll definitely both get funded.
    • next_xibalba 3y ago
      He seems to have gone the way of Eliezer Yudkowsky (but with actual technical chops).
      • bakuninsbart 3y ago
        For a very long time I thought Eliezer was one of the least likeable people on the internet, which should be a pretty high mountain to climb. But watching him on the Lex Friedman podcast was really interesting, and putting a face to the writing helped quite a bit in humanizing him. He's obviously neuro-divergent, and obviously very flawed in a number of personality traits, but he's quite intelligent and completely obsessed for more than a decade on a specific topic. I wouldn't just outright dismiss that.
    • kranke155 3y ago
      Is there any way he can even stay if Altman returns? Seems like one of them is out and making their own AI venture soon.
      • cft 3y ago
        If Steve can make him stay and remain productive, he's a real business genius
      • romanhn 3y ago
        He could possibly stay in a pure Chief Scientist role while abdicating his board seat. But if I were a CEO, I'd have a hard time trusting a C-level role to someone whose vision is diametrically opposed to my own.
        • bossyTeacher 3y ago
          He won't. In a company, you want all employees to share the same vision. Ylia and Altman clearly don't. There is no point pretending
      • DebtDeflation 3y ago
        Make him the same offer he made Brockman - you can stay on as an employee but you're off the board.
        • kyle_grove 3y ago
          That will keep him employed for the three nanoseconds until he gets an offer from a competitor.
      • bugglebeetle 3y ago
        He’d probably be better off going to Meta or HuggingFace and working on getting open source as close to OpenAI’s offerings as possible. I expect that real innovation (vs. commercialization) is now fully dead at OpenAI, with them instead focusing on ROÍ for Microsoft.
    • shmerl 3y ago
      If "bigger picture" means making more money with less safety concerns, then I think he is totally right to oppose that.
      • deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
    • hfjjbf 3y ago
      [dead]
  • bugglebeetle 3y ago
    Yeah, it looks like Sutskever was too late in realizing how far down the path of “embrace, extend, extinguish” OpenAI had gone and made a last ditch effort to stop it.
  • hotnfresh 3y ago
    Purely outside perspective, but people’ve been complaining for quite a while that OpenAI seems to have bailed on their original mission. Sure looks like Altman was capitalism’ing the whole thing—maybe not on purpose, but because it’s just the only way he knows to operate—and had kinda half-sold it to Microsoft, which sure is corroborated by folks posting on here expecting MS to now be in a position to forcibly override the nonprofit board’s decisions, and by rumors that in fact that’s what’s going on. Looks like they were right to boot him, but may have done it way too late, having already de facto lost control due to the direction he’d guided the organization. If he comes out on top, it’ll mean the original OpenAI and its mission is dead, looks like to me, and the board was already cut out months ago but didn’t realize it yet.
    • bossyTeacher 3y ago
      OpenAI was ideologically dead when when they sold it to MS imo
      • Davidzheng 3y ago
        Can we use more precise language please
    • 0xDEAFBEAD 3y ago
      Yeah it's interesting to me how many here on HN seem to be taking Sam's side -- I feel like I've noticed HN users in OpenAI threads mentioning how dishonest Sam is. Sam seems to have a "move fast and break things" approach which would be appropriate for a less critical industry
      • deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
  • jmckib 3y ago
    Does the board not have final control? Why have they agreed (in principle) to step down? I wish more of the reporting around this was specific about who has the power to do what.
    • cwillu 3y ago
      My understanding is that, fundamentally, the only power the board _has_ is to fire the CEO. The CEO, not wanting to be fired, is therefore incentivized to manage the board's expectations, which looks a lot like being willing to take direction from the board if you squint a bit. The problem comes when the situations starts to resemble the line about how, if you owe a bank a billion dollars, you own the bank: if the direction the CEO has taken the company differs enough from the vision of the board, and they've had enough time to develop the company in that direction, they can kinda hold the organization hostage. Yes, the company isn't what the board really wanted it to be, but it's still worth a bajillion dollars: completely unwinding it and starting over is unthinkable, but all the options that include firing the CEO (the only real lever the board has, the foundation of all the decision-making weight that they have, remember) end up looking like that.
      • Davidzheng 3y ago
        If you really believe in the ideology and believe that the continuation of openai is dangerous--shutting down the company completely should be an option you consider
        • cwillu 3y ago
          Oh, absolutely, although you'd have to consider what happens to the tech and the people who developed it: it may be better to have the out-of-control genie at least nominally under your control than not.
    • zeven7 3y ago
      My guess is it’s hard to say exactly who has the power and where the power comes from. I bet Sam and his side don’t have any direct power, but their power in the negotiation comes from other sources, like the ability of more Sam loyalists to resign, and Microsoft legal threats which don’t have to be legitimate to be effective since they have such powerful lawyers. So on paper the board has all the power, but that doesn’t necessarily translate to the real world.
• pjc50 3y ago
  I'm surprised nobody's leaked the minutes. It all seems very amateurish. I had thought it was secret news of big misconduct, but instead it's sub-amongus plotting.
  • jacquesm 3y ago
    At this point in time I wouldn't be surprised if there weren't any minutes. I mean, come on: the four people that knew this was going to happen appear to be the only ones unprepared to deal with the fall-out. Missing minutes would be a footnote. And might be a sign that there was stuff in the 'original' minutes that couldn't be aired.
• techterrier 3y ago
  seems he had a side hustle: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-11-19/altman-sought-billions-for-ai-chip-venture-before-openai-ouster?leadSource=uverify%20wall https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-11-19/altman-so...
• nostrademons 3y ago
  Also its likely that a large number of the news stories coming out right now are PR "plants" by one side or the other to make the firing seem justified or the return a fait accompli. In a coup one of the first tasks is to get public opinion on your side and build momentum for the outcome you want to see. I'm curious where the rank & file OpenAI employees stand on this, as it seems to me like they will be the ultimate kingmakers. The Reddit thread on Friday made it seem like they supported Ilya - but for all we know, the anonymous Reddit poster might have been Ilya himself.
  • alecco 3y ago
    I've only seen support for Altman from the press. (guess who spends ads on the press and has more political connections) The board was naive, to say the least.
    • chucke1992 3y ago
      Well, he is basically the face of OpenAI and ChatGPT and the whole AI push. And at the same time he is not unlikable either.
      • throw555chip 3y ago
        Which is unusual since it's been around since 1956: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_artificial_intelligence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_artificial_intellig... "The field of AI research was founded at a workshop held on the campus of Dartmouth College, USA during the summer of 1956."
    • nostrademons 3y ago
      The Bloomberg article about Altman seeking funding for a conflicting venture seems like a plant by the other side: https://archive.is/3LaJF https://archive.is/3LaJF
      • krisoft 3y ago
        That also sounds like a plant from Altman's side. This is the most important quote: "We can say definitively that the board’s decision was not made in response to malfeasance or anything related to our financial, business, safety, or security/privacy practices. This was a breakdown in communication between Sam and the board." If it were a plant by the other camp how would this make it there? Also the whole article sounds like "You don't want him as a CEO? He is going to get sooo much money, and going to out compete you sooo hard. He is already in talks for his new venture." Which is obviously what Sam's side would like to project.
• skwirl 3y ago
  It’s pretty clearly just a power play by four of the board members. Keep in mind Sam was part of the board and Greg Brockman was chairman of the board, so this was 4 board members ousting 2 other board members. OpenAI execs have already said it wasn’t for wrongdoing.
  • jkaplowitz 3y ago
    A majority of the board removing a minority of the board doesn’t seem like a power play to me. If the opposite were somehow achieved, e.g. through persuading one member of the majority to vote against their own interests, and using the chairman’s casting vote, that would be a power play. Also, the executive who said it wasn’t for malfeasance wasn’t himself on the board and appears to be trying to push for Altman’s return. The board themselves has not yet said there was no malfeasance. To the contrary, they said that Altman had not been completely candid with them, which could very well be the last straw of malfeasance in a pattern of malfeasance which in aggregate reaches a sufficient threshold to justify a firing. I don’t know whether there was or wasn’t malfeasance, but taking that executive’s word for it seems unwise in this polarized PR war.
    • junofan 3y ago
      You’re saying the board is trying to bring back an employee they know committed malfeasance?
      • jkaplowitz 3y ago
        I’m not saying that. I think the main people pushing for that were Altman-aligned members of the management, staff, and investor populations, not the board. The board was considering the requests to bring back Sam because they realized they were handling the situation badly and didn’t want the organization to blow up and fail at its mission, but they refused to resign unless and until suitably mission-aligned replacement board members were agreed upon (note that profit is not the nonprofit’s mission). Of course they didn’t bring him back in the end, or resign, after all. If the board had yielded to similarly minded replacements and brought back Sam, that isn’t the same as exonerating him, only realizing how badly they handled the firing. I can imagine that an independent investigation into the truth of the existing board’s allegations would still have been ordered by the new board, just as the new interim CEO actually did. If it was truly just a personality clash leading to mistrust, that would probably be the end of it. If there truly was malfeasance that makes Sam and unsuitable CEO, they’d probably then engage a PR firm to help make the case to the world far more persuasively than happened on Friday. Yes, this is speculation, but I’ve been a nonprofit director and president myself, and if I were on that replacement board it’s what I’d do. In that case, the organization was much lower-profile than OpenAI, and we were spare-time volunteers with a tiny budget. The closest we came to self-dealing is when a long-time director wanted to become a paid software engineer contractor for us, but he left the board in order to make that ethically clear, and the remaining board approved the arrangement. Nothing hidden or dishonest there, and he’s continued to be a great help to the organization. (Disclaimer: I stopped my own involvement with the org over 4 years ago myself, but that was truly because the rest of my life got too busy. There was no drama or anything around that.)